The Simple Good News
Left to ourselves, we all have a broken relationship with God, however, God has made a way to restore it.
All relationships are based on what we share in common with another person. Specifically, relationships are based on our shared values.
The God that made this world is good. The highest value that God lives by is beneficial love for others. God is also interested that humans share this value.
Problem and Solution
However, we have all chosen our own selfish value system. From infancy our motivation has been selfish, to get what we wanted. Left to ourselves, we don’t know how to be any other way. This selfishness of people is the cause of all broken and damaged relationships in this world. It also breaks our relationship with God. It makes us rebellious against the way that God wants us to live.
God sent Jesus to bring a solution to this problem. Jesus came to teach us beneficial love and to demonstrate it with his life. He came to establish a new spiritual kingdom for all people. Jesus is the king, and he offers a way for all people to enter into his kingdom and to have relationship with him: we take him as our king and adopt his value system.
The way it works
God wants to forgive the rebelliousness of our selfish values. In response, we must be willing to give up our own value system and instead adopt the value system of God - beneficial love. This gives us something in common with God and becomes the basis for relationship. Making this change is challenging for us because it is not in our nature, but God gives us strength to grow in this change.
If we do not choose to respond to this offer of forgiveness, we will be dead to God. Death is a relational term because it clearly describes the state of our relationship with God. This death is the simple consequence of our chosen selfish values because they cut us off from God. Because of our choice, we simply have nothing in common with God. Our choice continues indefinitely and even to the afterlife. The effect is loneliness, some now, but intensely so in the afterlife.
The offer to come into God's kingdom is free to us, although it came at great cost to God. God sent Jesus, and although we don't know how, Jesus is both fully God, and was fully human.
Jesus had to die to implement forgiveness for our rebelliousness. For a time at his death he was cut off from relationship with God! In substitution then, he took the consequences we deserve. So in this, Jesus died both physically and spiritually.
Then after a couple of days God restored Jesus to full physical life. His renewed physical life is convincing evidence that Jesus also possessed full spiritual life. Since Jesus had absorbed the spiritual death which we deserve, he is now able to forgive our rebellion and to offer us spiritual life. ••• Because he conquered death, he showed that for us, hope for life can be a certainty.
This is what happens in forgiveness! The forgiver absorbs the cost of the relationship consequence from the offense. An offender is unable to undo an offense after the time that it happens. It is as if they owe a relationship debt to the other. Only the forgiver can restore the relationship by taking up this cost on themselves.
The one forgiven then needs to change their value system as part of the process of forgiveness.
See more at Forgiveness
Wrap-up
The good news is simple: there is a part you believe and there is a part you do. The part you believe is what God has done for you, that God lived this value system of love for you. The part that you do is to start learning and living this value system of God for others.
So, please choose to become a follower of Jesus
The value system perspective used here is based on ideas from the work of Darren Twa.